Blues, history and the dramaturgy of August Wilson

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Jay Plum

August Wilson's dramatic project is comprised of a cycle of plays that explore some of the historical choices that have confronted African Americans during the twentieth century. Wilson contends that the black community currently is floundering because it has failed to turn to its history for strength or guidance:

... blacks in America need to re-examine their time spent here to see

the choices that were made as a people. I'm not certain the right choices

have always been made. That's part of my interest in history--to say

"Let's look at this again and see where we've come from and how

we've gotten where we are now." I think if you know that, it helps

determine how to proceed in the future. (Powers 52) Although the process of empowering the African American community through history appears relatively straightforward, it is potentially problematic, since traditional historiography is the product of a Eurocentric world view that valorizes white men. Because the cultural experiences of marginalized groups like African Americans have been interpreted by historians according to the values and ideals of a white male culture, the recovery and, indeed, the revaluation of African American history demands an alternative method of inquiry, one that is distinctly African American.

Perhaps it is not surprising, considering Wilson's functional aesthetic as well as the limitations of historical discourse, that Wilson claims his project is "entirely based on the ideas and attributes that come out of the blues" (qtd. in Goodstein and Rosenfeld C4). For Wilson, the blues are the African American community's cultural response to the world; they are a music "that breathes and touches. That connects. That is in itself a way of being separate and distinct from any another" (Ma xvi). The blues are a connective force that links the past with the present, and the present with the future.

The analysis of Wilson's blues aesthetic that follows is much indebted to the vernacular theory proposed by African American literary scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Like Wilson Baker provides a broad and open-ended definition of the blues, describing them as an amalgam of work songs, group seculars, field hollers, sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald humor, elegiac lament, and much more' (5). The blues, rather than being a hybrid of European aesthetic forms, constitute an expressive matrix that reflects the complexities of African American culture. Their potential as a critical tool in examining African American literature is consequently far-reaching. By using Baker,'s vernacular theory of the blues as its interpretative framework, this study offers an R.S.V.P. to his "invitation to inventive play" (14). I specifically seek to explore how Wilson's plays function as a cultural trope that foregrounds the marginalization of African Americans in order to reawaken cultural consciousness.

History theoretically is an open-ended discourse that does not constitute reality but provides a meaning, or an interpretation, of past events by an objective observer. In practice, however, historians subjectively choose and arrange events to reflect their own cultural experiences, making the so-called objectivity of history a fallacy. In constructing American history, for example, historians (the majority of whom have been white male Protestants) have valorized white male settlers and marginalized women and people of color. As such, American history tends to be the story of religious men willed by God to tame a savage land devoid of humans and human institutions. Whereas Puritan and Pilgrim settlers (and their descendants) function as subjects in this narrative, marginalized groups such as African Americans play supporting roles.

Wilson's dramaturgy challenges the secondary position of African Americans within American history by contextualizing black cultural experiences and, in turn, creating an opportunity for the black community to examine and define itself. Rather than writing history in the traditional sense, Wilson "rights" American history, altering our perception of reality to give status to what American history has denied the status of "real." To this end, the blues provide a mediational site where the contradictions between the lived and recorded experiences of African Americans might be resolved.

The story of Joe Turner's chain gang is a case in point. Although the chain gang affected the personal lives of many African Americans, traditional histories of the United States make little or no mention of the phenomenon; historians in effect have written this experience out of existence. At the turn-of-the-century, however, a group of African American women musically documented the effect of the chain gang on their lives:

They tell me Joe Turner's come and

gone

Ohhh Lordy

They tell me Joe Turner's come and

gone

Ohhh Lordy

Got my man and gone

Come with forty links of chain

Ohhh Lordy

Come with forty links of chain